The SOAPBOX/Tuesday March 3, 2015 --

TPM NewsBy ERIC TUCKERMarch 3, 2015, 2:45 PM WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department investigation will allege sweeping patterns of discrimination within the Ferguson, Missouri, police department and at the municipal jail and court, a law enforcement official familiar with the report said Tuesday. The report, which could be released as soon as Wednesday, will charge that police disproportionately use excessive force against blacks and that black drivers are stopped and searched far more often than white motorists, even though they're less likely to be carrying contraband.Read More...

Counter Punchby JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN 03/03/2015 The special US-Israeli relationship is as secure today as it has ever been. There is no danger that Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress will have a “destructive” effect on our commitment to Israel’s “security”. After listening to National Security Adviser, Susan Rice’s, speech to AIPAC this evening, I shut off the television and realized, to my chagrin, that, if anything, Israel may even benefit from the international media soap opera touched off by Netanyahu’s hubris: shame on our political leaders, news commentators and spin doctors for allowing the personal animosity between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, divert us, yet again, from the real issues.Read More...

The death of Tamir Rice was “directly and proximately” caused by the 12-year-old’s own actions, the city of Cleveland has argued in a defense document following a civil claim from the boy’s family. Rice was shot dead by a police officer last November. When he was shot, Rice was holding a toy gun that police mistook for a real firearm. The incident sparked widespread criticism that officer Timothy Loehmann, who killed Rice, employed a drastic overuse of force. The city of Cleveland’s defense, filed with the US district court on Friday, argues that both Rice and members of his family are to blame for any damages, injuries and losses arising from the incident. The argument lists 20 lines of defence, including that Rice did not “exercise due care to avoid injury” and that members of his family, including his mother and teenage sister, who have lodged the claim, sustained damages “caused by their own acts”.Read More...

Tikrit offensive seen as setting stage for future operation to recapture key city of MosulCommon DreamsbyDeirdre Fulton, staff writer)03/02/2015 The Iraqi military, backed Shia militias, launched a large-scale offensive on Monday to reclaim Tikrit from Islamic State militants, who overtook the central city last June. A force of up to 30,000 soldiers and fighters is reportedly attacking Tikrit from different directions, backed by artillery and airstrikes by Iraqi fighter jets. The extent of U.S. involvement in Monday's offensive was unclear. However, the Combined Joint Task Force reported Sunday that a U.S.-led coalition launched seven air strikes against Islamic State militants over the weekend in both Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, the coalition used warplanes and drones to strike near Al Asad, Al Qaim, Kirkuk, and Mosul, destroying Islamic State tactical units, boats, a storage facility, buildings, and other targets, according to the statement.Read More...

Activists in Chicago are demanding a thorough investigation into Homan Square, a local detention facility which is being compared to a CIA black site. Several dozen protested on Saturday after police denied the accusations.RT.com--03/01/2015

Waging Peace with David Hartsough (Soapbox Podcast 03/01/2015)

"David Hartsough knows how to get in the way. He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines. Hartsough’s stories inspire, educate, and encourage readers to find ways to work for a more just and peaceful world. Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. Engaging stories on every page provide a peace activist’s eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past 60 years, including the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States as well as the little-known but equally significant nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Waging Peace is a testament to the difference one person can make; however, it is more than one man’s memoir: it shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending the spiral of violence and war."

Coming in March, Watch: The Prosecution of An American President

The Reckless Lies of War Mongers Counter Punch by JOHN PILGER 02/27/2015The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism. “To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”Read More...

The new world order is chaos Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has positioned itself, one administration after another, as a global supercop guarantor of world peace. Indeed, since the end of World War II, even as the US has projected its power worldwide through military might, its clever ideologues have managed to convince a large portion of their public opinion that their ambitions for global hegemony are altruistic and benevolent. This dichotomy between the fictional discourse and the brutal reality of US imperialism, applied globally since 1945, is more blatant than George Orwell’s worse fears expressed in “1984“. In this war-is-peace construct, nothing is what it appears to be, and imperialist wars are sold to a gullible citizenry as being humanitarian. Despite the disinformation propagated by the think tanks and Western mainstream media outlets, factual evidence shows that currently, the clear-and-present dangers to world peace are not ISIS, “Russia‘s aggressive acts” or Ebola but, rather, the US military and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).Read More...

Yournewswire.com02/26/2015CERN is due to re-open the large hadron collider in March of 2015 in order to recreate the big bang, despite warnings from top scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grasse Tyson.Allnewspipeline.com reports: Dr. Stephen Hawking recently warned that the reactivation in March of CERN’s large hadron collider could pose grave dangers to our planet…the ultimate reality check we are warned. Hawking has come straight out and said the ‘God particle’ found by CERN “could destroy the universe” leaving time and space collapsed as shared in the 2nd video. Is CERN the most dangerous thing in the cosmos that could lead to the ultimate destruction of the Earth and the entire universe? Recent developments prove to us the scientific community is no longer able to explain ‘reality’ without looking at the ‘supernatural’. Will we soon learn CERN is really the ‘ultimate stargate’ and one of the gate-keepers most closely guarded secrets? Will this be the way man attempts to break the ultimate ‘God barrier’, an attempt to encounter demi-God’s in an all-out rush towards the destruction of all creation? We understand they won’t be releasing the secrets until they’re prepared to release them.Read More...

WSWS.org26 February 2015 US armored vehicles flying American flags were paraded Tuesday through the Estonian city of Narva, just a few hundred yards from the Russian border. The provocative action, coming on the heels of the first anniversary of the US-orchestrated coup in Kiev, underscores the transformation of the entire region into a zone of military confrontation, with potentially catastrophic implications for the peoples of not only Eastern Europe, but the entire planet. Spearheaded by the fascistic Right Sector militia, the coup that toppled the government of President Viktor Yanukovych on February 22 of last year was carried out with the direct support and intimate involvement of the US government. Washington’s execrable representative on the scene, the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, went so far as to name those to be allowed into a post-coup regime.Read More...

Bill Jubilant groups rally to tell the president that it's time to reject tar sands pipeline 'once and for all'Common DreamsbyLauren McCauley02/25/2015Following years of fierce environmental campaigning by a grassroots movement against the monied fossil fuel industry, President Barack Obama on Tuesday vetoed a Congressional bill approving the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Only the third veto by this president, many hope that the action marks the end of a six-year approval process for an $8 billion pipeline project that would carry synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands mines in Alberta, Canada and connect to the completed portion of the pipeline in Steele City, Nebraska, which then would carry the oil to Gulf Coast refineries. Though White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the president's rejection would occur without "a lot of drama or fanfare," reaction was immediately jubilant as many saw the move as a huge win for the climate movement.Read More...

Missy Beattiehas written for National Public Radio and Nashville
Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns
Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.comLatest:Torture is Exactly Who We AreRead Missy's Blog...

MISSION STATEMENTCindy Sheehan's Soapbox is an independent online radio show and blog that strives to be completely free from establishment political ideology and focus on a message of peace, justice, environmental sustainability and economic equality. To this end, we provide educational and inspirational programs on topics related to these issues and we organize/promote actions working towards peace, justice, and environmental sustainability. Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox LLCP.O. Box 6264Vacaville CA. 95696SubmissionsContact Advertise